This is so simple and so obvious that I am surprised many folks are overlooking the evidence that is right in front of us. The emails provided by Donald Trump Jr. show conclusively that the so-called Steele Dossier (you know, the "Golden Shower Russian Hooker Show) is a total fraud. How so?
According to the dossier, regular exchanges between Mr Trump surrogates and the Kremlin actually dates back five years:
Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting U.S. Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump for at least five years. . . .
In terms of specifics, Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, for several years (see more below). This was confirmed by Source D, a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow, and who reported, also in June 2016, that this Russian intelligence had been "very helpful".
If all this true then why does Donald Trump Jr. need to take a meeting, which is arranged by a tabloid journalist, with an unknown Russian lawyer who claims to have dirt on Hillary? If the dossier is true then the Trump folks/surrogates already had that info. Why take info from an unknown source when, per the Democrat narrative, the Trumps have a direct pipeline to Putin and have been colluding with him for years?
The Trump Jr. emails expose "junior", Kushner and Manafort as terribly naive and totally ignorant of the alleged massive Russian intelligence effort to meddle in the U.S. election and install Putin's puppet, Donald Trump Sr., as President. The emails prove conclusively that Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort had no idea about the alleged five year relationship with the dastardly Russians, who were busy collecting and funneling dirt on Hillary to team Trump. The fact that the Democrats (and apparently the Trump team as well) have not grasped this simple fact exposes the lot as not thinking clearly about the matter.
I am in full agreement with your comments.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 13 July 2017 at 09:46 AM
Hard to answer for sure IZ. Obviously. But i'm inclined to think his supporters will be disgruntled, but, mostly, passive.
What I think is the more relevant question, at least for me, is whether or not a GOP like candidate will go after his followers. Or will the GOP swing back to it corporate norm, DC insider, neoliberal base? IOW...can they keep Trumpism, without the burden of Trump? That's the key question. To me.
Posted by: jonst | 13 July 2017 at 09:58 AM
Yes, I believe I referred to the sex,drugs, and rock and roll crowd. However, the countries south of the border might have discovered that supplying drugs to those idiots was not the best way to improve their lives. Maybe figuring out how to form governments that aren't run by brutal leaders who don't give a darn about their citizens would be the best way to improve their lives. Like in the ME, there seems to be a culture of violence there.
I will put myself into the prejudiced category here. I grew up in a small town and went to school with half my class being Hispanic. I had MANY Hispanic friends. They were the ones whose families came here and decided to become American and to adopt American values. The other Hispanics were the ones whose families were dirt poor, didn't value education and spent most of their time traveling back to Mexico and giving half their earnings to families down there.
My own parents were children of immigrants--from Russia, of all places. They were the Germans from Russia. My mother worked alongside Mexicans in the beet fields of Northern Colorado and lived in the same sort of shacks as they did provided by the land owners. My father's family homesteaded in the northern drylands of Colorado. They eventually moved into the middle class, too.
The difference was that they fixed up their shacks, saved their earnings. Now you can check out Weld County Colorado's economy. Most of them ended up owning their own farms or doing well in other occupations. And they expected that their kids do well in school and behave themselves.
That meme about our heavy use of drugs does not apply so much where I grew up. We weren't stupid. That's a big city East Coast/West Coast problem in many instances. The marijuana here in CO is annoying to most people, but we know that it is being regulated and contained. I have NO friends or relatives who don't feel that the use of drugs and/or alcohol is o.k. ever. Beer might be consumed, but on special occasions and in moderation. We are, after all, the home of Coors. Church going people know of the importance of not desecrating the temple of our souls.
All this Russia, Russia, Russia stuff is just a detraction to cover the fact that these people don't have a clue about governing but sure do know how to form "investigations."
Posted by: DianaLC | 13 July 2017 at 10:12 AM
The Electorate must be held accountable; like this baker who voted for Trump since he thought that Obama had shown no backbone against Putin.
As I was listening to him, I thought to myself: "Does this fellow understand war and what it does?"
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 13 July 2017 at 10:32 AM
I think you are reminiscing about a time before 1960s; before the Drug Culture took over the minds of men and proceeded to ruin US as well as weaker countries such as Mexico, that did not have the resources of the United States to cover the damages caused by it.
I think, today, as far as Drug Culture goes, there is no difference between bi-coastal areas and the Fly-Over-Land; everywhere one goes, one is living in a Drug-infused environment - from Junior High schools to universities to parks, public libraries, housing, street corners.
In a way, it is rather interesting to me as a foreigner, to observe 3 cultural phenomena occurring in the United States at about the same time period: A Drug Infused Environment, a Food-Poisoned Environment (where cheap and bad food is widely available) and a Sexually-Charged Social milieu (e.g. the crooner called Madonna with her persona that one can be a virgin and dress like a whore at the same time) that at times becomes quite tiresome to navigate and deal with.
You will not get any arguments about this "Russia, Russia, Russia,..." - it is, I think, the politics of the United States as usual. If there were no Russia, it had to be invented - I should imagine. But the Republicans brought this unto themselves with their interminable investigations against Clinton and later on by dragging him through mud because of his dalliance with a pretty little thing - finally impeaching him out of vindictiveness - lacking any substance.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 13 July 2017 at 10:49 AM
Sam,
There was a good piece by Benjamin Schwarz in ‘The American Conservative’ back in January 2016, entitled ‘Unmaking England: ‘Will immigration demolish in decades a nation built over centuries?’
(See http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/unmaking-england/ .)
Clearly, what we need to do now is think of the best available, or least worst, way of handling with the mess which has been created.
But for Martin Wolf to dismiss terrorism as ‘just a nuisance’ is stupid beyond belief.
One of the things which terrorists can commonly very easily do is polarise.
When you have a large mass of unheeded resentment about Muslim immigration in the ‘native’ population, and a lot of disoriented second-generation immigrant young Muslims, caught between what their cultures taught them to regard as sacred and the temptations of Western society, a degenerative dynamic is very easily set in motion.
Indeed, it already has been, and the question is now very much what is the ‘least worst’ way of handling the situation.
To make these calculations, one needs people who have some understanding of the Islamic societies, and of the post-Soviet space: also, people who can make a serious attempt to understand how Western societies actually work.
(How our societies actually work, is, obviously, rather different from how they are supposed to work in our idealised ‘butter-wouldn’t-melt-out-of-our-mouths’ self-images.)
A precondition for such an understanding is an ability to grapple with military matters, and also the enduring role of religious, and quasi-religious, beliefs in human affairs.
Unfortunately, ‘supermen’ – or ‘superwomen’ – who have the requisite combination of intellectual adventurousness and mundance practical experience are not easy to find. But Western ‘élites’ are materially less likely to produce some people with some of these qualities than they once were.
Posted by: David Habakkuk | 13 July 2017 at 01:18 PM
As ‘b’ has not commented here today, thought I’d share some information before this thread gets too stale. A commentator (hat tip to ‘h’) posted information that indicates Don Jr’s meeting with the Russian lawyer was a put-up job orchestrated by the DNC. Wikileaks has copies of emails dated May 16, 2016 where the DNC and Clinton cabal are discussing “Music video by Emin Agalarov, son of Putin-tied, Russian real estate oligarch Featuring Donald Trump “.
RE: Video Request: Trump in 2013 Music Video
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/11812
So why are individuals connected to the DNC and Clinton discussing this video some three weeks PRIOR to Trump Jr.’s meeting, specifying ‘Putin-tied’? I can only think of one reason.
The commentator also linked to a reddit post by the source of this find.
I HAVE THE DEMS END GAME ON DT JR MEETING…
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6mqseq/i_have_the_dems_end_game_on_dt_jr_meeting_hes_a/
quote:
"MOST IMPORTANT PART (summary). This DNC hit job to connect Emin to Putin and then Emin to President Trump was planned BEFORE THE DNC WAS "HACKED" BY "RUSSIA". This was their end game all along. Their next "bombshell" will be "Who is this Emin that set up the meeting? Oh wow he's connected to Putin and here is President Trump in his music video". This is how they're going to use this bullshit cooked up meeting to go after President Trump. All planned since May of 2016 before anyone was "hacked". And they weren't, his name was Seth Rich . . ."
Posted by: pantaraxia | 13 July 2017 at 01:21 PM
dc,
It is actually not that tangential.
Your observations raise a range of very fundamental questions, about what ‘intelligence’ means. And these are questions which are difficult actually to frame properly, as well as to answer.
But, to take a ‘sighting shot’, I think that a steadily increasing proportion of our ruling ‘élites’ have come from two overlapping categories: an ‘imbecile clerisy’ and a ‘narcissistic meritocracy.’
An ‘ideal type’ example, in the United States, might be Richard Perle. (He is known as the ‘Prince of Darkness’ – but perhaps, somewhere down in Hell, Satan is saying that he cannot be held responsible for this village idiot.)
As to Britain, the examples are legion.
Posted by: David Habakkuk | 13 July 2017 at 01:21 PM
Morongobill,
There are very different kinds of intelligence.
One may have finely-honed intellectual capabilities, perfectly adjusted to operating in the ‘bubbles’ of Washington DC or London – and be completely incapable of understanding the undercurrents developing at the ‘grassroots’, in the United States or United Kingdom: still less, the latent forces of fanaticism in the Middle East.
One such was Peter – nor Lord – Mandelson, whom I once knew quite well.
The kinds of intelligence he possessed made it possible for him to be instrumental in creating ‘New Labour.’
His lack of other kinds of intelligence is now a prime reason why ‘New Labour’ is – suddenly and unexpectedly – dead.
Posted by: David Habakkuk | 13 July 2017 at 01:30 PM
Cunning but not Intelligent, Smart with no Judgement, Knowledgeable but lacking Insight, Matriculated but Uneducated.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 13 July 2017 at 02:16 PM
I think the desire to maintain one's own way of doing things is an eminently defensible position. Recently, the Iranian Parliament, precisely on those grounds, denied a bill for automatically extending Iranian citizenship to children of Iranian women by foreign men.
This was largely directed against Afghans; a people that from many angles the closest foreign people to Iranians.
Further South and East, I cannot imagine very many Shia Iranians would welcome the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Deobandi Muslims into Baluchistan.
The English people, in my opinion, have a right to be concerned about their culture - especially in greater London area.
Please note that the centrality of alcohol consumption to European socialization makes integration and assimilation and inter-marriage that much more difficult.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 13 July 2017 at 02:28 PM
Ishmael,
Sorry for the late response. I got busy kitchen painting and grease monkeying on my car.
If Obama was still President (although a Constitutional impossibility), I don't think the world would be any less safe. His reticence to taking action was actually comforting. I say this in spite of the continued presence of people similar to Nuland within that administration.
Clinton is another story. Considering what the Russians tried to do do her during the election, think what she would have done to Russia if she was in office? Probably not nuclear war, but it would have gotten dark and ugly. Colonel Lang's writings convinced me she is an ideologue. Before that I thought she was more pragmatic. I don't want ideologues in the White House.
Posted by: The Twisted Genius | 14 July 2017 at 11:53 AM
What I find interesting, is that for a big innocent nothing-burger of a meeting, Don Jr felt it necessary to make up a series of lies about it—and I think we've caught him in another lie today (now it turns out there were more than the 5 people at the meeting. (Additionally a translator, and an admitted former Russian intelligence officer were present.) It's also interesting that server in Trump tower started it's communications with Alpha Bank a few days after this meeting. Also Don Sr promised us startling new revelations about Hil's emails a couple of days after this meeting. Now he claims he only heard about his meeting a few days ago. We'll see how long he sticks to this story...
Posted by: beowulf888 | 14 July 2017 at 03:41 PM
beowulf888,
At least we aren't talking about the content of the Podesta emails or who decided a private server for the Secretary of State - Hilary- was a great idea. Because hey, the dirt on Trumps opponents turned out to be a Hilary set up operation via Fusion GPS. We also aren't talking about why the founder of that firm now flip-flopped and refuses to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I wonder what the founder of Fusion GPS has to hide. I'm sure the MSM won't be asking.
Posted by: Fred | 14 July 2017 at 05:06 PM
There's nothing wrong per se with opposition research, as long as it doesn't break Federal or State laws. It's when you ask a foreign government to do your oppo research for you, well, then that skirts with treason. Hacking into a campaign's servers, even if you receive the "stolen goods" from someone outside the country, is illegal (and in the digital age, it's the same as breaking into a campaign HQ). But even if you can with a totally clear conscience say that the Trump campaign never colluded with the Russians, you're still missing the other elephant in the room At the very least Russia acquired Kompromat on the Trumpster's son and on all his aides who attended that meeting. The fact that Don Jr is lawyering up and is franticly spewing of half-thoughtout lies makes it pretty clear to me that Don Jr realizes that his actions are potentially prosecutable. What does that say about Donnie? He at least a semblance of a moral compass left (although he probably regrets that he didn't take the direction it originally pointed him). The talking heads jumping up to defend his actions probably have no moral compass at all.
And since you bring up Fusion GPS, let's also bring out the fact that they were originally engaged by an anti-Trump Republican group to dig up dirt on the Great Orange One. And the group threw in the towel when it was clear that Trump had the nomination in the bag. The owner of Fusion GPS was so shocked at the quantity and seriousness at the dirt dug up on Trump that he engaged Steele to investigate the international angle. Now you may try to create moral equivalency here between the Dems hiring Fusion GPS and Trump Jr's meeting with Veselnitskaya. But buying oppo research from a British ex-MI6 consultant is not the same as receiving oppo research from a representative who had some important connections with some important people in Moscow who want to see your dad elected. It may be that lifting sanctions was never openly discussed. But there's really no need, because both sides know the score.
Posted by: beowulf888 | 15 July 2017 at 01:42 PM